"It's incredible how convincing I can be with a camera pointed at me/ But sometimes rapping feel like tapping to make a cracker happy." That was Cee-Lo on the 2004 space-funk workout "I Am Selling Soul". Two years later, Cee-Lo is dressing up like Darth Vader and covering the Violent Femmes in Gnarls Barkley, and I wonder how he feels about making crackers happy these days.
Gnarls Barkley, is, of course, the reason this quickie best-of exists. While other mid-1990s rap veterans thrash around trying to find ways to stay relevant in an increasingly perilous and unpredictable commercial landscape, Cee-Lo has found platinum success and a receptive audience for his scratchy helium-gospel lisp and his self-consciously freaky alien-loverman persona. It wasn't a preordained fate by any means; even his old Dungeon Family compatriots Outkast are now struggiling to push their voices forward without driving their fans away. For years, Cee-Lo was Southern rap's resident weirdo, the guy who talked about the Velvet Underground in interviews and thanked Portishead in liner notes, but who still absolutely wrecked in a battle-rap context.
As one-fourth of the great Atlanta group Goodie Mob, Cee-Lo's slippery lightspeed chirp worked as a perfect foil for the deep, measured drawls of the other three, and he could howl out a furiously soulful chorus whenever needed. The group's first two albums, 1995's Soul Food and 1998's Still Standing, are completely essential. But after 1999's pretty-good World Party fell short of its obvious pop-crossover goals, Cee-Lo left the group and recorded a pair of uneven solo albums. 2002's Cee-Lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections and 2004's …Is the Soul Machine both have great moments, but each feels like the work of someone struggling against formal constraints and staying blissfully unaware that those constraints were a huge part of what made him great. As a rapper, Cee-Lo was one of the best working. As an omnivorous mad-scientist Prince-wannabe who sometimes rapped, he needed some work. But now that he's apparently left rap behind completely and his name is ringing bells, Arista has raided both of those solo albums for this completely inessential collection.
Cee-Lo's short-lived solo career only yielded two singles that could even charitably be described as hits. They're both here, of course, front-loaded at the beginning of the album, and they both sound great. Perfect Imperfections' "Closet Freak" is a tense, jittery disco vamp that explodes into a ridiculously huge funk orgy halfway through. And Soul Machine's "I'll Be Around" is an irresistibly sidelong Timbaland percussion-storm, though Timbaland improbably outraps Cee-Lo on his quick guest verse.
If Cee-Lo had made another 15 tracks like those two, this album would be a godsend. But both of those albums came loaded down with half-baked funk experiments, exactly the sort of things that best-of albums are supposed to weed out. No such luck; this one makes room for the barely-there dub-bop excursion "Bass Head Jazz" and the plinky calliope-laced circus-rap "Childz Play", and the loose fake-Isaac Hayes spoken-word dissolve "Sometimes". None of those songs are terrible, but none of them warrants iPod space either. A few of the tracks are actively awful: "The Art of Noise" is the Neptunes at their dinky Vegas lounge-swinger worst, and "Grown Man" is a bit of cloying, boring jam-band fake-jazz nonsense.
On a handful of songs, though, Cee-Lo does exactly what he hoped to do in going solo; he takes his rap virtuosity far outside the genre's boundaries and finds unprecedentedly fierce ways to explode boxes. "Evening News" is the sort of track that DJ Premier never makes anymore, a restrained but psychedelic leap into the jazz-noir ether; Cee-Lo coos and moans and screeches and then all of a sudden launches into a shockingly harsh battle-rap verse before returning to the crushed-velvet loverman flourishes. And "I Am Selling Soul" starts out as surprisingly great spoken-word space-disco with rippling Latin-funk drums, shivering strings, and tricky little jungle breakdowns, and then it stops without warning and morphs into slow, vicious dub-rap as Cee-Lo rails about art-vs.-commerce frustration: "There is no part of me that can't be calculated into commodity."
But the most poignant part of Closet Freak comes in its last two tracks, a pair of prime cuts from the first Goodie Mob album: the woozily organic "Soul Food" and the creepily paranoid "Cell Therapy". Even at his best, solo Cee-Lo still has yet to come close to the easy transcendence he found with his old crew. Back then, he wasn't content to bitch about rap from the sidelines; he was too busy making it better. Last year, the Goodie Mob, who had soldiered on to diminishing returns without Cee-Lo, announced that they'd be reuniting and even recorded a new song on the Big Boi's Got Purp? Vol. 2 compilation. But now that he's touring with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and playing European festivals, Cee-Lo's been silent on the subject. I think that's crazy.
